Literate Ape is a literary digital 'zine and a dumping place for the random musings of a small shrewdness of diverse apes who managed to learn to read and write and use computers.

ABOUT THE APES IN CHARGE

Don Hall — co-editor

Don Hall is a freelance events consultant, founder of Literate Ape and author of four books including Belief is a Sledgehammer, Like a Burning Moth With No Idea How He Caught on Fire, and Strippers, Guns, and the Holocaust Museum.

David Himmel — co-editor

David Himmel is the author of the books A Camp Story and the forthcoming The Last DJ. An award-winning journalist, he is a contributor to POLITICO and is the former editor in chief of Chicago Health magazine.

Do bad habits indicate you’re smarter than the rest of us or just that you’re a sloppy, late, fantasy who suffers from poor time management skills? As the #MeToo movement is starting to find equilibrium with Arizona Ansari and Chris Hardwick recovering from accusations of harassment and abuse, is it too soon or just right?

Plus six things to do this week that do not involve grabbing someone’s pud or biting your nails.

Don reads an article about The Nation redacting and apologizing for a poem they printed which starts out a rambling conversation centered on whether offense is pain, whether Hamilton is problematic, and how Mike Tyson’s 90’s video game was incredibly diverse.

Plus six things for you to do because the screen has boot your brain and you seem to need two assholes in Chicago to spice up your vapid life.

Today, David and Don tackle the shadow of anxiety recently defined as Trump Anxiety Syndrome. Dancing around the idea that therapy is either necessary (David) or quackery (Don) both agree that allowing a jackass in the White House cause you to cower in fear or depression is a completely avoidable thing.

And, because your life is filled with so much time to stare at your screen and fill your craven heart with dread due to the non-stop headlines about our Commander-in-Quife, the guys suggest six things more productive.

OK, gang. This one is definitely not for the weak. An intense discussion of clean assholes, rim jobs, whisky dick, and cracking under torture due to an aversion to dairy gets fairly NSFW. I mean, we assume you play this podcast loud in your office every week, so don’t with this episode.

AND we throw out some great suggestions to occupy your time as the globe swiftly spirals toward oblivion.

The boys dive in deep with a serious disagreement about the concept of unconditional love. Does it exist? If there are conditions, is it really love? Does breaking trust mean the relationship is over? All started as a discussion of the weight of new parenthood, things start to spin out of control as David creates a bizarre hypothetical to get Don to admit he’d divorce his wife and the semantics take over.

Plus, six things for you to do this week because without structure and a list, your life is a meandering shuffle through procrastination and staring into the void, eventually succumbing to the existential despair that only post-2000 living can bring.

The chimps in a living room discuss David’s reunion with the parents of an ex-girlfriend at a wedding this weekend and his desire to make sure they relate how amazing his life is now to his ex. They also reveal the podcast’s only Apple Podcast review and David provides a response.

Plus, six tasks for you, the unwashed listener, to occupy your time so can avoid thinking about the emptiness of the daily plummet toward your own demise because you can no longer watch Roseanne for distraction.

The Apes in Charge talk at length about two completely disparate ideas — revenge and birthdays (PS: David is really, fully middle-aged now) and, as usual, come up with few conclusions but many opinions.

Plus six tasks for listeners that allow them to marinate in the nostalgia of the eighties as a way to avoid contemplating their own meaningless deaths.

More marriages end due to money issues than any other reason so the Apes dive into strategies to keep it from disintegrating before your eyes, jump down the cliff of the anxiety of freelancing some more and glide down memory lane pointing out some of their favorite vacations.

Plus we get a “you were there” recording of David’s grandmother seeing his tattoo for the first time and as always, six tasks for you to accomplish this week so your own money-deprived wedded hell blowing up in your face doesn’t cause you to end your week in a gutter with a tampon soaked in heroin in your ass.

How much of what we read is truth and how much is fiction? Extrapolating from the works of both Tim O’Brien and Oliver Sacks, the monkeys in charge go down a rabbit hole of the impossibility of finding objective truth when our brains are not hardwired to see it. From fiction to storytelling to accusations and jury duty (with a quick detour into the Kennedy Assassination), these two idiots still have no real answers.

They do, however, have six tasks for you to attempt for the week that will ensure you don’t burn your eyeballs with the image of your lint-filled belly button while eating only Hot Pockets and jerking off to the same PornHub video of step siblings humping while mom is away.

Number 27 includes conversations with the boys about that new job smell, the tendency to be more social at the workplace than is wise, the Expectation Theory, the Starbucks bathroom policy, the question of the shelf life of redemption in the Age of #MeToo, and the weird new trend of Incels.

Also, six things for you to watch in the next week to ensure you have something to talk about when socializing with your semi-drunk colleagues after work on Friday.

David and Don discuss the idea of someone you work with dying (prefaced by the passing of WWDTM’s Carl Kasell), the reframing of death, that impulse to stop yourself from posting something online that might need a moment of reflection, and the idea that social media prevents us from making mistakes and evolving into better people.

AND…six things for you to do, watch, read or listen to because in the plethora of choices, a little guidance might be helpful.

Episode 25 includes Don and David discussing the recent controversy surrounding the Simpsons character Apu, the brilliance of Norman Lear, the cuisine of the alcoholic, and the fact that David is Ferris Bueller and Don is the guy who joyrides in Cameron’s dad’s car.

And, as always, six things for you to do as you endure the fucking non-Spring Spring of Chicago to avoid slitting your wrists.

David brings up the big question: does today’s film and television circle jerk with nostalgia (Fuller House, Stranger Things, the new Roseanne) inhibit the impulse to create new ideas? Be warned: lots of nostalgia is present in the episode including Planet of the Apes, Will & Grace, and The Avengers. We also discover David’s unreasoning hatred for Joseph Gordon Levitt.

And, as always, the boys provide six tasks for you to fulfill your Eagle Scout badge requirements because you can’t start a fire for shit…